Goodbye Tabula Rasa

Sometimes, we're all a little prescient. We can see a bit into the future. The problem is, we can never predict when we're going to have one of those moments, and we never actually know we've had one until it's already come and gone.

Roy and I have been having one of those prescient moments about Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, the game we called The Best MMORPG You're Not Playing (January 27, 2008 blog entry). We went online on the game last night because we're consolidating our game accounts down to just a very few. We cancelled our Tabula Rasa accounts last night and just wanted a few screenshots for posterity, just to prove 'We Were There.'

Sure enough, this greeted us when we signed on:

"To the Tabula Rasa Community,

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we've achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while.

Stay tuned for more information. We thank you for your loyal support of the game and encourage you to take us up on the benefits we're offering Tabula Rasa players.

--The Tabula Rasa Team"

 

Online in the game, as we gathered our final screenshots, we heard the usual misplaced griping that accompanies such sad moments, when a game that people like is about to come to an end. General chat was filled with angry comments. There was the usual claim that the game publisher and developer didn't advertise enough. And NC Soft's efforts to ease the pain a little bit were angrily rejected in more such misplaced anger.

 

The general feeling seemed to be that NC Soft was cancelling Tabula Rasa to get its players to sign up for other NC Soft games, and that truly loyal supporters of Tabula Rasa would reject such overtures and refuse to play any other NC Soft games.

 

Oh bollix. The same 'shoot yourselves in the foot' reaction we have seen over and over among the subscribers of failed games that have not generated enough active subscribers to stay alive.

 

What NC Soft is offering Tabula Rasa players is actually quite nice:

 

"On February 28, 2009, Tabula Rasa will be shutting down its servers, and as of January 10, 2009, the game will be free to play.

To thank our loyal Tabula Rasa fans we've prepared a little closing down gift. Any active paying player as of 10:00 AM Pacific Time on November 21st, 2008 will be eligible for all of the following:

• 3 free months of City of Heroes including digital client
• 3 free months of Lineage II including digital client
• Aion beta access (coming soon)
• Aion pre-order access (available in 2009)
• 1 free month of Aion including digital client (available in 2009)"

All NC Soft is trying to do here is offer SOMETHING to loyal TR subscribers. CoH-CoV and especially the very popular Lineage brands are strong and successful MMORPG titles in their own rights that do not need the paltry TR subscriber list to stay alive. Granted, none of those games offer anything remotely like the sci-fi based story line of alien invasion in TR. But there isn't a lot that NC Soft can do about that. They did TRY something very different, and very fun, but flawed.

Roy and I certainly did our bit. We blogged on TR several times, wrote role-playing story lines, and we wrote one of the first well read reviews of the game that remains our single biggest blog entry in terms of hits. And there wasn't much more that could have been done to bring attention to the game.

After all, Garriott turned his entire trip into outer space into an unprecedented advertisement for the game. Do more advertising? How exactly do you top that?

If the TR users aren't foolish, they will at least get a few free months to try out some other games. They might even find something they like. We note here that WE are loyal players of, in effect TWO NC Soft games already in City of Heroes and City of Villains, and no one is offering US free time on other games. Laughing out loud.

Anyway, we're sorry to see TR go, because it opened a lot of new ground. It just didn't do it well enough to stay alive. It's not good, for example, when the TR website lists fewer hits in Google than Veronica Dunbar -- Redhead Girl Geek Chic. A single blog with more hits than an MMORPG...wow.

For our part, we're not sticking around in TR just for the freebies. TR will be even more of a ghost town as things wind down. We've noticed that the players we didn't care for much are the ones on most of the time now, and griping. And we hate griping and whining. It's like our two least favorite human interactive experiences. So, we've deleted the game from our hard drives, kept a few screenies, and now it's on to other things.